Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
Mark HaddonI think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
Mark Haddon... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
Mark HaddonAnd when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars donโt even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you donโt have to take them into account when you are calculating something.
Mark Haddon